How The Walking Dead’s Latest Victim Lied to Everyone for a Year

Sunday night was a divisive one for Walking Dead fans in more ways than one. As we all know by now, the Season 7 opener finally showed whom Negan killed at the end of Season 6’s finale—a bloody reveal that left some fans devastated but craving more, and others ready to quit the show. It’s a typical fan response for a big reveal like this, but it also spoke to a huge feat on the part of AMC: keeping a large contingent of fans in the dark for more than a year. According to Michael Cudlitz, who spoke about the episode Monday on a conference call with press, keeping the secret wasn’t too hard—it just required some deception. More discussion ahead, but first, your usual spoiler warning.

As fans now know, Cudlitz’s character, Abraham, bit the dust first, followed by Steven Yeun’s Glenn. How did Cudlitz keep his end of the secret? Well, it actually took several tactics.

The only people Cudlitz let in on the truth were his wife and children, for obvious reasons. As he put it, “It’d be kind of strange sleeping in every day in Los Angeles when I’m supposed to be filming in Atlanta.” Cudlitz kept the secret from everyone else through a combination of lies and discretion.

First off, like Josh McDermitt, who plays Eugene, Cudlitz found that keeping his hair consistent helped keep people in the dark. He came into his hair dresser in California roughly every three weeks to refresh his red shock of hair, saying that he could stay in Los Angeles a day longer if he got styled there.

Another key to success? Multiple gym memberships. Why?

“The guy at the gym at the desk said, ‘I’m getting a little concerned because you’ve been in for a lot of days in a row now,’” Cudlitz recalled. So the actor said he would be leaving in a few days, then started going to another gym.

“Everywhere I went, I would tell somebody, ‘I’m leaving in two days,’ or [that] I’d just gotten in town,” Cudlitz said.

One thing that did help were some rumors the show was able to spread—like the idea that the cast didn’t know who died. “All of that was a lie,” Cudlitz said, “but what it enabled us to do was to not have to defend who was dead or hide who was dead.” For a while, anyway.

Because the cast is so large, Cudlitz also noted that sometimes they aren’t all filming at the same time—leaving time to travel, and thus throwing fans off even more.

So, from the sounds of it, casual fans who aren’t into the idea of stalking shooting locations and tracking actors’ every single moves might want to give up trying to spoil the show for themselves. Sure, there are some obsessives who have managed to irk AMC through their sheer dedication to spoiling the show’s every reveal, but for the Average Joe? It might be best just to sit back and let the suspense wash over you—like a nice splash of blood and viscera.